Admission requirements

This course is an Honours Class and therefore in principle only available to students of the Honours College. There are a few places available for regular students.

Description

Data Science deals with handling, processing, analyzing, interpreting, and extracting knowledge from data, ultimately to derive optimal decisions. Often, the term is associated with the concept of big data, i.e., data that is characterized by large volume, high velocity of generation, and data variety, meaning many different types of information.

Today, data science is of paramount importance in just about any domain, ranging from the life sciences, including e.g. health and biosciences, to banking, insurances, retail, and heavy industries.

The possibilities for generating new insights and decisions based on data are considerable. This Honours Class first introduces students to some of the fundamental concepts of Data Science and then continues with overviews of specific application domains.

Course objectives

Upon successful completion of this course, students will:

Have a general overview of the possibilities in the field of data science;

Have knowledge of different types of data;

Be able to understand and perform basic data analysis tasks;

Have basic knowledge of some of the tools used in data science;

Have developed skills for several tools for analyzing data;

Have experience with performing basic analyses for real-world applications.

Programme

The lectures are a combination of (guest) lectures and practice.

Lectures 1 to 3: General Introduction
What is data science? The importance of data science. Techniques used in data science. Different kinds of data. Relation to statistics. These lectures are a combination of (guest) lectures and hands-on sessions with different tools.